Advertising is used to convey various types of information to an audience. To fully maximize the performance of an advertisement, it is desirable for the advertiser to be able to gather information regarding effectiveness of the advertisement(s). This effectiveness measure may comprise both how many people saw the advertisement, whether people paid attention to it. In general, for traditional offline advertising (e.g., billboards, posters, television commercials) data gathering is typically based on information related to where the advertisement is placed. For example, for a billboard advertisement, effectiveness may be measured by the amount of automobile traffic that passes the billboard. Similarly, for a television commercial, effectiveness, or popularity, may be based on popularity ratings for the television show during which the television commercial was aired. In this way, information regarding the popularity of an advertisement may be inferred based on the advertisement placement information. However, it is typically very difficult to directly measure popularity of traditional advertisements. Because these advertisements are not interactive, it is difficult to know if people are actually paying attention to them.
Recent technological advancements have led to the creation of a new type of advertising medium, the interactive video display system. Interactive video display systems allow real-time unencumbered human interactions with video displays. Natural physical motions by human users are captured by a computer vision system and used to drive visual effects. The computer vision system usually uses images captured by a video camera as input and has software processes that gather real-time information about people and other objects in the interactive area viewed by the camera.
For interactive video display systems, it is possible to gather information regarding displayed images based on the same methods used for traditional offline advertising mediums. However, in addition to providing real-time interactions, it would be desirable to have an interactive video display system that is capable of capturing and managing information derived from such real-time interactions not available to traditional offline advertising mediums.